“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks”:

New Film Explores Untold Radical Life

of Civil Rights Icon


Democracy Now!


The new documentary “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” gives a comprehensive look at the legacy of the woman known for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Beyond helping to inspire the Montgomery bus boycott that ended Alabama’s bus segregation law, Parks was also a lifelong supporter of the Black Power movement and organized in campaigns to seek justice for wrongfully imprisoned Black people, political prisoners, and Black rape survivors like Recy Taylor, whose case Parks investigated for the NAACP in 1944. We speak to the film’s co-director, Yoruba Richen, who says Parks paid a price for her activism, including having to leave Montgomery for Detroit to escape public backlash. “We often think of these civil rights leaders as heroic, and [they] make these stances, and then everything’s fine. But the risk and the danger that they face is often not explored,” says Richen. We also speak with Jeanne Theoharis, author of the best-selling biography “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” on which the documentary is based, and a consulting producer. “She shows up for everything,” Theoharis says of Parks’s activism. “She is looking for all different kinds of strategies to challenge the kind of racial injustice in this country, the social injustice, poverty, war.” Read more here.

Valerie Maynard, Artist Who Celebrated Black Identity, Dies at 85

A sculptor and printmaker aligned with the Black Arts Movement, she tackled racism and oppression while reflecting on African American culture.


By Alex Williams

nytimes.com


Valerie Maynard, a Harlem-bred artist whose sculptures and prints explored the complexity, but also the humanity, of Black identity while tackling racism in the civil rights and apartheid eras and beyond, died on Sept. 19 in Baltimore. She was 85.


The writer Alexis De Veaux, a longtime friend, said she died of cardiac arrhythmia in a hospital.


While Ms. Maynard, who was aligned with Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, explored various mediums and materials over a six-decade career, her work was consistently unflinching in its social commentary. It mined the historical legacies of oppression, both at home and abroad, while also celebrating the joy in the African American cultural experience and the beauty of the Black visage and form.


“This is art that summons, that creates what should be and disassembles what should not,” Toni Morrison wrote in the introduction to “Lost and Found,” a limited-edition 1989 portfolio of Ms. Maynard’s lithographs. That portfolio was part of “No Apartheid,” a celebrated series of more than 250 works using spray-painted acrylic that Ms. Maynard produced in the 1980s and ’90s. “The medium is dream,” Ms. Morrison added, “but the power is magic.”


Ms. Morrison, Stevie Wonder and Lena Horne were among the notables who purchased Ms. Maynard’s work. Her sculptures were also seen in “If Beale Street Could Talk,” Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of the 1974 novel by Ms. Maynard’s longtime friend James Baldwin.


The plot of that book and movie involves a young sculptor imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. Ms. Maynard and others who knew Mr. Baldwin believed that the story was based in part on the experience of Ms. Maynard’s older brother, William Maynard Jr., an aspiring actor known as Tony, who was a friend of Mr. Baldwin’s and who had been falsely accused of murdering a Marine, leading to more than six years in prison before he won his release.


Ms. Maynard provided her own commentary on such injustices with works like her acclaimed sculpture “We Are Tied to the Very Beginning,” a bust of a Black male head, its face frozen in an expression of agony with two fists clenched on a wood pedestal beneath it.


Although Ms. Maynard never achieved the fame of Mr. BaldwinMaya Angelou, Amiri Baraka or some of the other artists associated with the Black Arts Movement, her influence was deeply felt.


“Valerie Maynard is one of the most important postwar American artists that most people have never heard of,” Bill Gaskins, the founding director of the Photography + Media & Society program at the Maryland Institute College of Art, said in a phone interview. Mr. Gaskins wrote an essay for the catalog of a 2020 retrospective of Ms. Maynard’s work at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

“She was committed to the evolution of the human species,” Mr. Gaskins said. “What did it mean to be human from the perspective of women? Of Black people? All the while, she was subtly revealing the contradictions of life in the 20th and 21st centuries, always with an eye toward our better selves.”


Ms. Maynard’s work is in “Black Melancholia,” a group show at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., that explores “the depression that racism itself generates — the dread, anger and despair that create a low-pressure area in the soul,” Holland Cotter wrote in a New York Times review in June. The show runs through Oct. 16.


Even Ms. Maynard’s large-scale works of public art — like her sweeping glass-and-tile mosaic mural in the 125th Street station of the Lexington Avenue subway line in Harlem, or her nearly 17-foot-tall stainless steel airfoil sculpture commemorating Black veterans at Ramsay Park in Boston — convey a Black point of view that she felt was intrinsic to her work.


“It’s in everything,” Ms. Maynard said of her Black identity in a 1990 interview with Art Papers, an Atlanta-based art advocacy group. “You cannot shake off who you are. Your voice, the way you sit, the way you talk, everything — it cannot be taken away.”

Obituary for FOL WCC's Chef L.Chad Jones | Lea Funeral Home


We will truly miss you..."Lawrence Chad Jones". As our supporter, friend, and Chef for the FOLWCC he has always provided sustenance (for body, spirit, and soul) to so many people - especially social and economic justice warriors. He will be remembered and receive rewards for his work in service to the people. We have tasted that sustenance and we are always been healthier and stronger for it. Thank you LC and FOLWCC. Lawrence Chad Jones, PRESENTE!  


https://www.leafuneralhome.com/obituary/Chad-Jones

November 2022 Community Calendar of Events

10th-13th, Thursday-Sunday


Southern Historical Association 2022 Annual Conference 

We are delighted to invite you ...... the Southern Historical Association’s Program Committee will convene for the 2022 conference at the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland, November 10-13, 2022. Katherine Charron has organized the panel on NC Black Labor History including our own...


-James Wrenn, NC Public Service Workers Union-UE local 150 activist & NC State University student


"The Price of Democratic Government and Freedom: The 1978 Rocky Mount Sanitation Workers Strike and the Struggle for Black Political Power in Edgecombe County, NC"

 

12th, Saturday; 11:00-11:45 AM

Salt and Cardiovascular Risk; EmPowered to Serve Class offered in-person at the Southeast Raleigh YMCA! Register at: https://empoweredtoserveclass.eventbrite.com.

For more information contact Donnae at heydonnae@email.com


12th, Saturday; 1:30 PM

Memorial Celebration of Saladin Muhammad - BWFJ founding member, longtime labor, and community activist; Franklinton Center at Bricks in Whitakers, NC. RSVP required at (252) 907-4443 or email: shafeah@mac.com


21st, Monday; 6:00-6:45 PM

Know Your Family History (virtual class); EmPowered to Serve Class Register at: https://empoweredtoserveclass.eventbrite.com.

For more information contact Donnae at heydonnae@email.com


Mark your Calendar for our Community Kwanzaa Celebration at FOLWCC!


Thursday, December 29th, 4-7pm

Music, Storytelling, Drumming, Dancing, Community Good News, and our Community Karamu (feast). If you’d like to help with continued planning and or/if you are an interested vendor contact Nathanette at (919) 876-7187.

Current and former government officials, now corporate paid lobbyists, among the most wealthy glorified and vilified characters of these tumultuous years have forged a peace—working together to ensure the world’s wealthiest and most powerful players and class thrive amid today's economic and social turmoil !

Stevie Wonder on Musical Inspirations and Political Issues